President Discusses Issues With Black Leaders

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

Published: January 26, 2005

President Bush told a meeting of African-American religious and community leaders on Tuesday that he remained committed to a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage and that fighting H.I.V. and AIDS in Africa remained a priority, a participant in the meeting said afterward.

Mr. Bush also encouraged the leaders to support his plan to add personal investment accounts to Social Security, which White House officials say could benefit blacks because they have a shorter average life span than whites and end up putting more money into the retirement system than they take out.

African-American men ''have had a shorter life span than other sectors of America,'' Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, told reporters. ''And this will enable them to build a nest egg of their own and be able to pass that nest egg on to their survivors.''

Mr. Bush's meeting with the leaders and his scheduled meeting on Wednesday with the 43 members of the Congressional Black Caucus are part of an effort to reach out to a group that gave him little support in November's election. Polls of voters leaving voting places show that the president received 11 percent of the African-American vote, up from 9 percent in 2000.

Mr. Bush is trying to increase black support for the Republican Party in presidential elections and to improve his image among African-Americans, many of whom remain angry that he has refused to meet with black groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

His meeting with the caucus members, all Democrats, will be his third, and the second time he has invited them to the White House.

Mr. Bush first asked the caucus to meet with him shortly after his first inauguration, in January 2001. Despite the group's repeated requests for another meeting, Mr. Bush did not meet with it again until February 2004, when caucus leaders called to say they were coming to the White House.

They were let in a few hours later to meet with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser. They then said they would not leave until they saw the president. Mr. Bush showed up about 20 minutes later, said Representative Elijah E. Cummings, the Maryland Democrat who led the group then.

In the meeting on Tuesday, participants said Mr. Bush affirmed his support for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, a position embraced by many conservative African-American religious leaders.

In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Mr. Bush alarmed conservatives by appearing lukewarm on such a ban when he said that ''nothing will happen'' on the amendment for now because many senators did not see the need for it.

At the meeting, Mr. Bush ''said he was going to be standing strong on the issue of marriage because there were some folks who had raised questions about whether or not he was going to spend any political capital on that,'' said the Rev. Eugene F. Rivers III, the president of the National Ten Point Leadership Foundation, a coalition that represents primarily black churches. ''And he said, 'Look, I'm clear, I've stated my position, and my position is not going to change.'''

Mr. Rivers, a Democrat and a Bush supporter, was one of about 20 leaders at the meeting.

The White House said the other participants were Bush supporters of both parties. They included Robert L. Woodson Sr., the founder of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, based in Washington, and Deborah Wright, the chief executive of Carver Federal Savings Bank in New York.

Photo: President Bush met with about 20 African-American leaders for a little more than an hour yesterday. (Photo by Carol T. Powers for The New York Times)